Karen Hanson, "How Bad Can Good Art Be?"

How bad can good art be
moral space from which one might praise or even just leave art alone
seems precipitously eroded. We have not, however, so far found
much real reason to worry about a depraved discontinuity between
art and life. Is the moral quicksand in fact on the other side, in the
connection between art and life
We should step carefully here, if only to mark off one serviceable
path for exploration rather than another. To investigate the idea that
art may corrupt, we need, of course, not only a standard of morality
or, at any rate, some defensible moral judgments, but also some
detailed empirical evidence. It may be no more difficult to gather and
interpret properly evidence about art's effects than it is to obtain useful
evidence about a host of other matters, but it is certainly not obvious
that philosophy, or even what philosophy may call "common
sense," has this evidence to hand.
It must be admitted that current U.S.law has a different, a less cautious
or more generous view of the disclosures here of common
sense. Writing for the majority in Paris Adult Theatre I v. Slaton, and
citing Justice Cardozo's assertion that "all laws in Western civilization
are 'guided by a robust common sense,"' former Chief Justice
Warren Burger dismisses the import of the argument that no scientific
data conclusively demonstrate "that exposure to obscene materials
adversely affects men and women or their society":
If we accept the unprovable assumption that a complete education requires
the reading of certain books, and the well nigh universal belief that good
books, plays, and art lift the spirit, improve the mind, enrich the human personality
and develop character, can we then say that a state legislature may
not act on the corollary assumption that commerce in obscene books, or public
exhibitions focused on obscene conduct, have a tendency to exert a corrupting
and debasing impact leading to antisocial behavior 14
Leaving aside the crucial issue of this·case, the controversy about
state censorship, we can focus just on Burger's string of suggestions
about the relations between art and morality and on his sense of the
logical connections between those basic propositions. There seem to
be no clear rules of deduction guiding an inference to the "corollary"
that grounds the legislative action here in dispute, but, after all,
Burger also acknowledges that all these contentions may simply be
assumptions. Is there in fact widespread, common, acceptance of
these claims Surely at least the first of these propositions - "that a
complete education requires the reading of certain books"- is openly
debated. That we do not have here a settled social assumption is
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